Bad Trips: Meth

[00:00:00] Astonishing Legends Network Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Galari. Did you say Galari? Galari! And I'm Ed Guloa. Hey everybody! No, I'm not using that. You want to use it? Okay.

[00:00:28] This week it's time for a little pick-me-up. You know we've been tired as hell these days, and honestly, who isn't? So after the coffee stopped working, we started digging through the drawers that scared HQ to see what we could find. We guzzled the Red Bulls, slammed the five-hour energy shots, we tried Celsius Prime, Monster, double shots, we got our prescriptions filled, but nothing was working the way we really needed to. So there was really only one option left.

[00:00:55] Crystal, Crank, Ice, Yabba, the Devil's Adderall. Oh my god! That's right! Meth! From ancient herbal remedies to Nazi super soldiers to biker gangs and Breaking Bad, meth has a history that's as disturbing as it is compelling. So we return to our Bad Trips series to bring you Bad Trips Meth. What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Joy. Joy.

[00:01:26] Joy. Now it is time for... Time for... ...scared all the time. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. We've got another very funny, very freaky installment of Bad Trips for you guys this week. I hope you've been enjoying the bonus episodes. We are having fun throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. People who have reached out like it. They're pretty good so far. It's kind of a grab bag.

[00:01:52] We're trying to make it a little behind the scenes, a little stuff we like. Sometimes it's a little bit related to scary stuff or true crime or cases in the news. So keep listening. Keep letting us know what you like. We can try to skew it. I mean, you guys are our bosses essentially. So if you like what you hear, let us know. And if you don't, let us know. Yeah. And with that said, if you haven't followed us on Patreon yet, head over to patreon.com backslash scared all the time. Sign up.

[00:02:21] There's all kinds of good bonus content and keep an eye out for all of our new material. We're trying to be really good about social media now. So keep an eye out on Instagram on tick tock. And I hear if we tick tock enough, we actually get to call ourselves younger than we are. No. Like every day that I tick tock, I get to take a day off my age. Every day I do math, I lose a day. So is that the same? Does that math work out? Meth math? That's meth math.

[00:02:51] You'll learn about that in the episode. Absolutely. But before we get to the episode, Ed, I think we should do just a couple of five star reviews. You know them. You love them. If you leave us five star reviews, we read them. We appreciate each and every one of them. So go over to Apple, leave us a five star review. Click that five star button. And let's see. What are the people saying this week, Ed? All right. I'll start it. That's unusual for me. I'm going to go with a very recent one from username.

[00:03:20] I'm a disco ball. And the subject of the review is I like the froms. I think they meant to say I like frogs. I like the frogs. Yes. But it says I like the from gza. So F-R-O-M-G-S. Yeah. I'm getting a late night drunk reviewing vibe. Hell yeah. We'll take it. We love that. We love that. And the subject of the review is just ribbit ribbit. So I don't know if that's an impression of a frog. I don't know if I have to take that to Google translate to see if it says something else.

[00:03:49] That's like a, that's the key to the cipher. We now know that ribbit ribbit means five stars. Love the pod. Sure. So we can decipher the rest of the fromg language from that base. So that was a simple one. Five stars. I like the fromgza ribbit ribbit from I'm a disco ball. Thanks. I'm a disco ball. We'll go to big iron 23 five stars drinks with friends is the subject. It feels like hanging out with your buddies. If your buddies are scared of everything all the time.

[00:04:18] And of course frogs and a cat also lately baby brain. Moms ain't the only ones that get it. And that is very true. Baby brain is a horrifically debilitating disease that visits that descends upon anyone who has a child. I think so far we're holding up pretty well though. We haven't missed an episode. Yeah, my baby's alive. We actually did worse before your baby was here. That's true. We're really we're we hit the ground running after Felix arrived. So and then we've got one last one.

[00:04:47] I'll do here five stars. I'm here for the banter. That's right. You are at night. We've got the banter down pat the subject or the review says my favorite days are when a new episode drops you make my commute fun and I had to become a patron to make sure I didn't miss a moment. Thanks for the laughs. Hell yeah, and there is actually Ed. There is one other person this so this is not technically a five star review, but I wanted

[00:05:13] to shout this out because it really knocked my socks off every once in a while because as you guys know we do check the email, but we don't always respond because we are doing a million other things, but we got an email about Cleveland, Ohio from a fan named Ann and the topic of the or the subject line in the email is an upsettingly long topic suggestion

[00:05:38] email about Cleveland and I'm not going to read this whole thing because and who starts her letter dear hose boys sure my name is Ann. I am the mom of three kids one biological child who's autistic and requires constant supervision and support and two children that we adopted from foster care last year between everybody's needs and challenges with disabilities and trauma and all I am stressed all the time all caps sat feels like my reward for another couple weeks of holding it together and attempting

[00:06:08] to parent in a patient and healing way. I usually listen when I'm walking my lovable idiot dog around the neighborhood at night. I always laugh out loud and it feels like a much needed hangout with friends. I'm pretty sure that my random cackling laughter helps ward off potential attackers lurking in the bushes. So thank you. Wow. And then the email goes on to pitch in exquisite detail why we should cover Cleveland, Ohio on the show. And I got to say just as a just in general like the city of Cleveland, the city of Cleveland

[00:06:36] and I got to say Ed this email makes a hell of an argument for Cleveland, Ohio being an episode of scared all the time. So and I can't make any promises and I don't know when it would air if we were to do Cleveland, but this is an amazing email. I can't tell you how much we appreciate it. I can't tell you how much we love being there for you to make your laugh and ward off potential attackers. And you may see your Cleveland episode come to fruition.

[00:07:02] So fans, if you're listening and you've got stuff you want to send us, we do read everything and we appreciate everything we get. So don't forget we have a P.O. box. I always walk to the post office and I love coming home with something. That's true. When I go to drop off the merch to ship out, it's really fun to come home with something too. So don't forget we had a P.O. box on the website. Yeah, we and we haven't we've yet we haven't received anything dangerous or threatening yet. So no.

[00:07:31] So I want a big shout out to Carly who sent us a bunch of astronaut food and also in the in the vein of or in the style of astronaut food. Remember that I said that I hate bit of honeys the candy bit. Oh, honey. Oh, yes, but she included freeze dried bit of honeys. And I guess when you freeze dry candy or flash freeze candy or whatever they like explode into these crazy the last of us fucking zombie looking things. Oh, I had one of those. Yeah, I had the house when I brought it home from the people.

[00:08:00] And they're way better than a bit of honey. So I guess some things you just need to blow up. I guess that's not good advice. No, I'm saying in this in this one situation. It works. Yeah. All right. Well, we should really get started with the episode. But because we're doing every other week, it's also time for producer shout outs. So I'm going to do that right now.

[00:08:20] Amanda Morris, Anita Andrade, Andrade, Anna Banana, Ann Evans, Bambi, Buttercup Honeycutt, Christopher Mamrel, Cracked Paint Studios, Christine Monfro, Donna B, Echo Art at Blue Sky, Gabrielle Goodfellow, Isabella, JC, Jeff Q, famously hard to say last name.

[00:08:41] John H., John H., John, just John, Jonathan Banta, Carly Cannon, Kevin Williams, Kirsten Tattersall, Kristen Schoonover, Kyle, Lauren Martinez, Logan Torres, Madeline Miller Ween, Madeline. I will get to the bottom of it. Matt Sengstock, Melissa Larson, Michael, I give my permission to use my whole name, Smith, Nick Ang, who, you know, look out for some stuff coming your way internationally.

[00:09:08] OVL Mendoza, Rio, Roger E., Samantha Kardamund, Sean Manbeard Klein, Soft G and Gypsy, Timothy Moore and Will Ferguson. And we're back from producer shout outs. It's really time to start the episode now, guys. Thanks for listening. Before we get into it, we should be absolutely clear for reasons both moral and legal that we are not encouraging anyone to try meth, not even a little. It is highly illegal.

[00:09:36] It's schedule two substance and it's extremely dangerous, especially if you, like us, have any underlying mental health issues. It's one of the most addictive drugs on earth. And as you'll hear, it can straight up ruin your life or end it in pretty terrifying ways. Now, we know meth has had medical uses. It's technically an FDA approved medication for ADHD. And I think there's a dietary supplement you can get prescribed or something that's just straight methamphetamines.

[00:10:04] And we've certainly had the occasion to taste the sweet kiss of that ADHD medication once in a while. Yeah, totally. But trust us, recreational meth is a one-way ticket to hell. That's literally why we're covering it on the show. So, as we've pointed out about some of our drug episodes in the past, we are called scared all the time, not moderately unconcerned some of the time. So, you know it's bad. Oh, yeah. You know it's a bad drug. It's no good.

[00:10:30] If you've listened before, you know one of our greatest fears is our own brains betraying us. And meth is basically one of the best ways to get your gray matter to turn its back on you. It's a drug that forces your brain into overdrive, blasting you with euphoria at first, but then plunging you into paranoia, hallucinations, and psychosis. Your reality can completely disintegrate. And what's scarier is that meth will keep you awake through all of it.

[00:10:57] No mercy, no relief, sometimes for days on end. We learned in our sleep deprivation episode that just a few days without sleep can make anyone start hallucinating and losing their mind. Sure. So, now add a powerful amphetamine to that equation that cranks your paranoia up to 11, and you see where this can go south really quickly.

[00:11:18] So, today we are focusing on the worst of the worst meth stories, the most hellish, mind-shattering, please God never again experiences and consequences. We'll be diving into some horrifying true stories of bad meth trips and exploring what this drug does to your brain and body along the way. So, Ed, we're going to start with the basics. Never done it. We're going to start with, yeah, personal stories. I don't have any. Ed doesn't have any. No, I didn't do any. I haven't done it.

[00:11:48] Well, we've taken Adderall before. Prescribed Adderall. Prescribed Adderall. Not fucking just taking it off the street, yeah. Although, didn't you get prescribed a weird one once? No, that was, I don't know what that was. The white lightnings? No, white nightmares. White nightmares. I called them. Yeah, one time I was sent, because I always do, there's always shortages in this country, it seems like, of every drug all the fucking time. Mm-hmm. And so there was something where I couldn't get it filled, couldn't get it filled. And so I was like, I'm never again going to deal with driving to a million CVSs.

[00:12:16] I'm going to just use an online purveyor of pharmacy. Most of your insurance companies have some kind of online component. And so I was like, oh, I'll do it. I'll do it this way. And what they sent me was not what I've ever, it didn't look like my prescription. It didn't, nothing about it. I'm like, this pill is white, first off. Yeah. It was, everything about it was weird, but I'm like, ah, on the side it says it's correct. And I, that was fucking crazy. I was like, grinding my teeth. Yeah.

[00:12:46] I was, I was so nuts. I don't know what, so I called them white nightmares because they also gave me these like insane dreams. So didn't, didn't stick around with that. Well, at least you can sleep taking them. Yeah, I don't, I don't do the extended release or anything. So usually if I don't take, as long as I don't take anything in the afternoon or something, I'm fine. Yeah. But yeah, white nightmares was just so nuts. Smooth sound ever since, but that was one weird, weird prescription. And they sent me someone else's.

[00:13:13] Well, yeah, I don't think I've ever had any kind of, uh, I've certainly never had any pure meth experiences. I've, I've barely, I drink so much coffee most days that it doesn't even. I do get worried for children. Yeah. Because we're full blown adults. Yeah. I'll tell you right now. I know people whose kids are on higher dosages than I am as a 200 and almost 40 pound man. Yeah. That's not good. Yeah. I just saw something the other day. I didn't put it in this episode cause it was too far kind of off the topic really, but that

[00:13:42] there are studies being done now kind of on the first couple generations of kids who were raised on Ritalin, Adderall and Ritalin and the effects that it's had on them and how hard it's been for some of them to kick it and that kind of stuff. And it's, it's, I mean, look, you do what you gotta do. I'm not a, an anti-pharmaceutical person, but it certainly seems like we may be overprescribed a little bit. Uh, yeah. I would say as one of the only nations, maybe the only nation on the planet that has commercials

[00:14:11] for, for fucking prescription drugs. Yeah. I would say where there's a, there's a, where there's a will, there's a way and making sure we all are medicated in some way. Well, a lot of people self-medicate with methamphetamines and that's going to get us back on the same page where I want to start in a place where we're getting on the same page, but what exactly this episode is talking about. So methamphetamines are a type of stimulant and all forms of stimulants produce similar

[00:14:38] effects, a dopamine rush, euphoria, and a burst of energy, everything from caffeine to methamphetamines. I don't have that. Do you have that? Yeah. No, I've had enough caffeine to feel euphoric in the past, but I've, I've never experienced there are people in our lives who we know who are not prescribed it. Yeah. Who are like, they want the feeling that they get when they take it. Right. And I am prescribed it and I never get those feelings. Right. Well, that's yeah, exactly.

[00:15:06] That's how you know that it's, it's working as intended. Boring regular meth is just a white powder, much like the white nightmares. Oh my God. Do you think it was just, they're pressed into pills if they're sold as a prescribed pharmaceutical. Uh, but crystal meth is really where the horrific action is at and, and what most of our discussions today will revolve around. Uh, the stuffy dorks at the justice department tell us that crystal methamphetamine is a colorless,

[00:15:34] odorless concentrated form of D-methamphetamine, which is a powerful and highly addictive synthetic stimulant crystal methamphetamine typically resembles small fragments of glass or shiny blue, white rocks of various sizes. So that's, if you watched breaking bad, that's what Walter got really good at making was that blue glass. That was the aesthetically looks as though it's glass that are adding glass. Yeah. No, no, no. It's like sugar glass, you know, like it's a thin brittle. I don't know.

[00:16:03] I don't know what they were fucking stepping on this with. Now they're just using an Anderson window. Like it's powdered cousin. Crystal methamphetamine is abused because of the long lasting euphoric effects it produces in crystal form. Meth can produce even more intense psychological effects. Now, typically crystal meth is not just ingested the way that you would ingest a methamphetamine pill or an Adderall pill or something. It's smoked using a glass pipe. Oh my God. Glass on glass. Glass on glass.

[00:16:33] Much like a crack cocaine. Crystal meth can also be injected. I assume you melt it down first. And a user who smokes or injects the drug immediately will experience an intense sensation followed by a high that may last 12 hours or more. Now, before you say, well, hey, euphoria, that sounds good. I want to try that. No, you don't want to try that. You don't want to start the show. You don't. Because first of all, you listen to scared all the time for euphoria.

[00:17:02] You don't do drugs for euphoria. That's true. But crystal meth is associated with numerous serious physical problems. The drug can cause rapid heart rate, increased blood pressure and damage to the small blood vessels in the brain, which can lead to stroke or I'm sure probably create those the deadly berries that we talked about on our... Berries on your branches. Berries on your branches that we talked about in the sudden death episode.

[00:17:27] Chronic use of crystal meth can result in inflammation of the heart lining and overdoses can cause... Now, maybe I'm an idiot. I'd never heard of this before. Hyperthermia, which is not hypothermia. Sure. Hyperthermia is elevated body temperature, not hypothermia. That makes sense because I think any kind of speed raises your body temperature. Yes. So if you overdose, your body temperature can spike too high.

[00:17:56] It can cause convulsions and death. And individuals who use crystal methamphetamine also may have episodes of violent behavior, paranoia, anxiety, confusion, and not too surprisingly, insomnia. The psychotic symptoms that the drug produces can persist for months or years, even after you stopped using the drug. So this is not a drug that you want to fuck around with. This is not a, oh, I'll just try it at a party and see what happens because you can fuck you.

[00:18:24] This is one of those like, you can fuck your life up with just trying it once and it's not worth it. That's just from abusing the drug itself. As any good anti-drug program will tell you, drug abuse comes with other dangers. And in the case of crystal meth, those dangers run rampant. Users who graduate to injecting crystal meth expose themselves to a ton of additional risks, including contracting HIV, hepatitis B and C, and other blood-borne viruses. That might be the only graduation they attended.

[00:18:55] Yeah, I don't know. If you're graduating to using crystal meth, your education may have peaked early. Chronic users who inject methamphetamine also risk scarred or collapsed veins, infections of the heart lining and valves, abscesses, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and liver or kidney disease. Sure. More on all of that in a little bit. Okay. Because while crystal meth has become a scourge on society with a recent study showing that 5% of high school seniors have tried it. Shit.

[00:19:25] Not great. Although again, if you're on methamphetamines or if you're on regular amphetamines from the age of 7, by the time you're 18. I don't know though. I would like to see the numbers on that. I would like to see the numbers on people who were prescribed Adderall or Ritalin or any other kind. I don't know if Ritalin is, but any kind of amphetamine based attention deficit medication. I'd like to see the numbers on how many of them graduate to meth proper. Or is it that thing where it's like, oh, I smoke cigarettes every day.

[00:19:54] This isn't interesting to me. Right. Well, right. I don't know. I guess, I guess I should say, I don't know that being on Adderall from a young age would prime you to want to try crystal meth, but- That's what it sounded like you were saying. So why do you immediately come to defense? If you're searching for, if you're a person who's been taking Adderall since a young age and you are searching for the high of a stimulant, there aren't many that are going to give you that kick in the pants that you're really looking for at that point. Yeah. What was I watching?

[00:20:21] It was some, it was, I don't even think it was a comedy, but it was something where a person like couldn't get roofied because like the person didn't anticipate how many, like how many barbiturates they had recreationally had done where like that amount isn't going to work on this person. And I think it was that movie with, um, what's her head? It was a Carrie something, Carrie Mulligan movie. Oh yeah. Uh, that Emerald Fennel made not girl interrupted.

[00:20:50] I can't think of the name of the movie, but yeah, yeah, yeah. The movie they couldn't remember the title of was promising young woman, but the actual movie he was thinking of was the girl with the dragon tattoo. I like that you had to preface that the movie you're trying to think of where a person trains themselves to not be date raped by taking date rape drugs to give themselves a tolerance is maybe, or maybe not a comedy. You can't be sure. I couldn't be sure.

[00:21:16] But that, that said, I only bring it up to be like, Oh, what are the things where taking meth crystal meth is not the kick in the pants. It was intended to be right. What is your lifestyle? Your Hunter S Thompson lifestyle that led to being like, Oh, that's heroin. That was a waste of time. Didn't even feel it. You know, feel it. Yeah.

[00:21:43] Before we get too much into the scourge on society that crystal meth has become, I want to explore meth's roots because something I didn't know until I started researching this episode is that where to get crystal meth. But now we can get it by the end of the episode. Meth's roots are in literal roots. Oh. The roots of a plant called ephedra. This is not to say that it's just a plant, man. Smoke, smoke.

[00:22:11] It's the process of making modern meth is a highly chemical, unnatural process. But the story of meth itself technically starts about 125 million years ago during the early Cretaceous when the earliest common ancestor of the ephedra bush began growing beneath the feet of the dinosaurs. Shit, man. The bush itself is kind of a reedy horsetail looking thing. It's nothing special. But many species of this plant contain two specific alkaloids within its stalks.

[00:22:41] Do you think that's why in Jurassic Park when they're like trying to go to sleep in that tree? Yeah. And Brachiosauruses are still like up all night fucking chomping on trees. They've been eating in fedra or whatever all night. Probably. This plant, the ephedra bush contains ephedrine and pseudephedrine within its stalks. Okay. So these are the stimulants that make up amphetamines. And these stimulants act similarly to adrenaline.

[00:23:08] So they're known to raise blood pressure, increase heart rate, and generally perk you up. Humans have known about the ephedra plant for a very, very long time. And they've used it popularly as a drug to enhance athletic performance, promote weight loss, and mainly relieve colds and flus. I believe we discussed the bodies buried in Shanidar cave in Kurdistan in our Buried Alive episode. Probably. I think we did. It's one of the oldest burial sites in the world.

[00:23:36] It's over 50,000 years old. And the remains of the Neanderthals, they weren't even humans yet. They were still Neanderthals that were found there, were buried alongside plant remains that were coated in ephedra pollens.

[00:24:17] Huh. We knew about the properties of the ephedra bush as far back as 15,000 years ago. And that's because fossilized cones of the ephedra bush were found concentrated at a human burial site in Tafferalt Cave in Morocco. Now, what these cones, and when I say cones, if you can picture like a reedy, horsetail-y looking bush, the tips of those horsetails have these sort of cone-looking structures on top of them.

[00:24:46] I've been looking at them quite a bit because of all the frog pond bullshit I've been doing. But they're much more significant finds than pollen. Pollen can get blown in from wherever. Finding a bunch of cones concentrated around a human burial site suggests that these cones were used for something ritualistic or were being placed at this burial site as something to take to the afterlife. What exactly they would have been used for is really anybody's guess.

[00:25:13] So we have pretty strong evidence, though, that 15,000 years ago, we were pretty clued into what the ephedra bush could do. Sure. Fast forward another 10,000 years, though, and now we have written proof that ephedra was being recorded because it was a main component in Chinese herbal medicine. Oh, man. That poor guy who knew that got his head drilled or was offered to drill someone's head? One of those guys. There's a couple. We're going to talk about one of these mythological rulers and writers here.

[00:25:43] I don't think it's the same guy that we discussed in that poisons episode. But ephedra was classified as a medicinal plant by mythological Chinese ruler Shen Nong, who is credited with writing the Shen Nong Ben Kao Yang, the oldest- Which is a guide to partying. Yeah. It's a very early Tucker Max style book.

[00:26:07] No, this is the oldest surviving written record of Chinese medicine thought to have been compiled in the first or second century. This text is still referenced today, and many of the uses of the herbs that it describes are exactly how those herbs are still used today. It covers 365 herbs in total, corresponding to the natural cycle of days in a year. And these are divided into three different sections. There's the 120 upper herbs, which are not uppers.

[00:26:36] It's just the herbs upper- In the list. On the list. Got you. These can be taken daily to lengthen the lifespan. Dude, we got to get those. I know. There's 120 of them. So if you take all of them every day, I figure you probably can live a very long time. I think multivitamins cover a bunch. I'm like a single- My vitamins are like a single item per pill. And I just don't have the space in my little pill, seven-day pill thing. So you have like a vitamin D, a vitamin C, all individual?

[00:27:04] No, I don't do as many as they- I just do a few. Anything that I'm deficient in, I'll do. I see. Ladies, Ed is in desperate need of love. He's deficient in love. I wish- There's too many jokes to talk about what I'm actually deficient in. Because off of that, I can't now say I'm deficient in vitamin D. There's 120 upper herbs, which can be taken daily to lengthen the lifespan. There's 120 middle herbs, which can be taken to prevent and hold back illness.

[00:27:34] And 125 lower herbs, which treat illness but are mostly toxic and should not be taken for a long time. Okay. Sounds like, honestly, most of our modern pharmaceuticals. Yeah. Do you see in the commercial right now with Morgan Freeman talking about- He's hawking some pill right now. And it's just crazy because my ears perked up and I turned to the TV when I heard Morgan Freeman say diarrhea. Because he was talking about the common side effects.

[00:28:01] And then it ends with a play on Shawshank Redemption's Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying. Oh, yeah. So after listing this massive, like, oh, your intestines are going to fall out of your fucking butt and stuff. It ends with, like, get busy living. And then it says the name of the drug. I was like, this is wild. Woo! That man is 90-something years old. Whatever he's taking, I want to be on. I don't think it's this drug. Yeah. No, probably not. I feel like most drug pitch people are not on the drugs that they're pitching. Probably not.

[00:28:31] So ephedra appears on the middle grade scroll, which would match the use of how we use it today, which is the use of ephedrine for kind of acute things only and not for longer term use. The text describes it as, quote, bitter and warm. It is non-toxic, treating mainly wind stroke, cold damage, headache, and warm malaria. I think we're using it wrong, maybe.

[00:28:56] It effuses the exterior through sweating, eliminates evil heat, suppresses cough, and counterflow key ascent, eliminates cold and heat, and breaks concretions and hardness, accumulations, and gatherings. Its other name is Long Shah, or Dragon Sand. Okay, that's, we got to go back to that, right? It's a much cooler name than meth. Yeah, it's like, oh, what's your kid on? He's on Dragon Sand. Taking a little sprinkle sprinkle of the Dragon Sand.

[00:29:24] I don't think we're sprinkle sprinkling it. We're going for a little walk down the beach of Dragon Sand. I'm laying out in a beach of Dragon Sand. Hell yeah, dog. We're on vacation. If that's the way you say you're on meth, I'm going to start taking meth. Building castles in the Dragon Sand. Because that is an automatic text response I want sent out when I'm on meth. Another scholar, around the same time, wrote,

[00:29:50] Ephedra is the first choice in treating cold damage and resolving the muscles. Why do you write it like it's an ad? That's an ad copy. I don't know. I guess they maybe were trying to- Trying to sell it. Sell it. Trying to move a couple grains of this sand.

[00:30:04] Combined with cinnamon twig, armeniaca, and licorice, it may affect the cure of a Tai Yang pattern of wind cold in the exterior with pain and stiffness in the head and back of the neck, fever, generalized joint pain, a floating tight pulse, absence of sweating, chest fullness. Absence of sweating. That's what, if only Prince Andrew had had some of this for his-

[00:30:32] Remember when he said that he doesn't sweat anymore ever since he went to war or whatever? Prince Andrew? Isn't that the guy who was on Epstein's Island? Yeah, his whole- Why do you know about his sweat glands? So did you ever watch the terrible, like the really damning interview he gave where he went on TV and tried to defend himself? No. So one of his accusers, I forget her name. Said he was sweaty? The one that there's a picture of him with. Okay, sure. She said that she went to a club with him and he was sweating all over her at the club. Probably because he was on fucking Molly or-

[00:31:01] And his big defense in this TV interview was that ever since he had gone to war or whatever, which he never really- He wasn't like on the front lines of the battlefield. Yeah, since he vacationed in the Gulf War. Yeah. He had lost the ability to sweat, so therefore her story was made up. Oh my God. Because he couldn't have been sweating on her in the club. It also seems very verifiably like, hey man, we're going to do this interview on a treadmill. Well, what's extra funny is he looks like he's sweating in the interview.

[00:31:30] Yeah, because he's talking about his- Yeah, exactly. Dude, he's pulling at his collar. Yeah. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, I didn't know he was on that dragon sand. He was on that dragon sand and has been for quite some time. But it's the last bit there in that description of what ephedra can do, restoring chestfulness. That's actually what became one of the most important uses of ephedra.

[00:31:51] It's because the plant, the ephedra in the plant is what's known as a bronchodilator or helpful for relaxing specific muscles in your lungs. Well, bronchitis comes from- Yes. That's a bronch situation. It is a bronch. A forward bronchitis. A bronchiosaurus. Yeah, there you go. Shit, dude. Turns out those are the craziest dinosaurs. They're all fucking- Their eyes are just like Twilight Zone swirls. Yeah. They're nuts.

[00:32:16] No, the bronchodilator element is that it helps open the airways and gets you breathing deeply. So over time- Like Ricola. It's this property that resulted in ephedra's most popular use as an asthma treatment. Okay. It's been used- That's the main thing ephedra has been used for for thousands and thousands of years is asthma treatments. People have difficulty breathing. Which makes sense. If you have difficulty breathing, you're probably not very athletic. And so you never have to worry about giving someone something that raises and elevates their heart rate.

[00:32:46] So you probably shouldn't do exercise with an elevated heart rate. And so it's like, this is a perfect blend. This is a beautiful confluence of issues where it's like, they're not going to be running and they want their lungs big. This is beautiful. Yeah, I guess. I'm not saying this is great science. This is Ed's science. There's some holes in that theory. Yep, sure. And this is why Ed should probably never run a pharmaceutical company. I actually think I should run a pharmaceutical company.

[00:33:13] Ed, what other pills besides Dragon Sand would you develop for non-athletic people? Oh, man. Not to put you on the spot for a business plan. Yeah, I didn't have this prepared at all. Non-athletic people will kind of, I guess, boner stuff probably. That's good for everybody. Okay. It also raises your heart rate, boner pills. Yes. Well, it increases your blood flow. That's what they do, right? It just increases your blood flow. Yeah, but it's got to go to one spot. Sure. Otherwise, you're just like, my arms are hard.

[00:33:45] Stiff arms and legs, pre-episms in your entire body. The first 12 versions of Viagra, they just look like zombies. They're just like, arms are out in front of them. Until they fucking nailed it. Yep. And then they just look like a fucking creep. Yep. I didn't have an answer to you. I don't know. I don't know what else I'd make fucking unathletic people. That's okay. I was just curious if you had any ideas. Nope. Despite the popularity of ephedra and the ephedra bush being used in traditional medicine, it

[00:34:13] wasn't until 1885, so really recently, that ephedra's active ingredient, ephedrine, was isolated by a Japanese chemist named Nagai Nagayoshi, who was basically trying to make super caffeine. Okay. He'd been raised by parents who were traditional practitioners of medicine. And so he thought, I don't know if this was something that had been assigned to him or if he was just curious, but he thought to that, to the ephedra bush, the ephedrine, and was like, hmm, I wonder what we could distill from that.

[00:34:42] I mean, he probably saw in about a hundred years, fellow Japanese men will have, if they don't pass these exams, their lives are over. Well... So we got to get these kids something they can stay up all night with. As we will see, Japan has had a huge meth problem, but we'll get there. I bet. There's a lot of pressure there to succeed. It's not just that, but we'll get there. I'm sure it started that way. Freud had written about the wonders of cocaine just a year prior, so the world was interested in what else might... What years was cocaine in Coca-Cola?

[00:35:12] It would have been the 1800s, it definitely still would have been in. Yes, although it was... A hell of a drug. There was, so I ran across this in the research for this episode, obviously, and I wanted to see if that was an urban legend or true, whatever. Yes, early on in the formulation of Coca-Cola, there was trace elements of cocaine because of the flavor, the recipe, whatever, was formulated from the coca leaf, but it wasn't creating

[00:35:39] a bunch of cocaine-addicted super freaks in the streets drinking cocaine. It was a very minor... Well, good news thing, we'll get into it in the cocaine episode, I guess. But yeah, it's addictive, but at least there's no withdrawal. So you can take it out of Coca-Cola and people aren't going to be like, ah, my head hurts. Well, yeah. I mean, and what's funny is there is withdrawal from caffeine. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I get caffeine headaches because, as we've discussed, if I drank as much alcohol as I do caffeine, people would be concerned.

[00:36:09] They'd think I have... I'm concerned regardless. Because I... People who listen to the show think we drink that much alcohol. We don't. We don't. But my caffeine intake... And it goes up and down because if you've listened to this show enough, you know I've had some pretty... I've had anxiety issues and everything. So it depends where I'm at. And I try to keep it low. But I am a caffeine junkie to the point where I need to have a morning coffee of at least like 10 to 12 ounces.

[00:36:34] And then I need to have an afternoon coffee around two or three of at least 10 to 12 ounces. If I don't have that afternoon coffee, I wake up with a headache from the following day. The following day? So if I... Because I have a caffeine withdrawal and it won't go away until I have more coffee the next day. Now, Excedrin I think is a headache pill that has caffeine in it. Yes. And I don't think that's related in the sense that... Just saying, maybe you can take an Excedrin at midday. Well, I... Because you can't get a coffee made.

[00:37:02] I've done that before sometimes at night if I'm like, oh fuck, I didn't have my afternoon coffee and it's like six or seven at night and I don't want to... Take it out on Felix? No. And I don't want to make a coffee because I don't want it to be too strong or whatever. Every once in a while, I will take an Excedrin with caffeine because I know exactly... I think it's like 30 milligrams or something. Decaf coffee. Is that zero caffeine or is it less caffeine? I've never had decaf coffee in my life. I don't even know. Probably not zero zero, but it's like a non-alcoholic beer, right?

[00:37:32] Like it's got 0.001. I think non-alcoholic beer can't have alcohol, right? Because then how do people who are recovering alcoholics drink it? Hold on. Keep talking. Let me look this up. Well, I think there is half-calf. You can get like Green Mountain half-calf from Costco, which is half the caffeine, I believe. Yeah, I don't want that. But I'm saying when you said you want less caffeine, you're taking Excedrin. So maybe instead of taking a pressed pill, you can just have a half-calf.

[00:37:58] Non-alcoholic beer typically contains less than 0.5% alcohol by volume. That's still... I'm surprised to learn that because I just... I feel like you're not... Give your chip back, I guess, right? If you fucking drank a fucking Heineken Zero. Well, so reading here from beerismylife.com... Oh, this is good. Non-alcoholic beer is a type of beer that contains no more than 0.5% alcohol by volume. This means it does not contain any ethanol, which as we learned in the poisons episode,

[00:38:27] is the intoxicating ingredient. Got you. So technically, it's a loophole. Mm-hmm. It's a loophole. All right, well, then keep drinking your Heineken Zeros. It would be better for my stomach if I... Everything about you is a problem. True. Okay. By 1893, Nagai went a step further and synthesized a new compound from ephedrine, and that compound was, drumroll please, methamphetamine. He discovered it. He... Yes.

[00:38:57] He isolated ephedrine in 1885 and synthesized that into methamphetamines in 1893. So what's meth come from? The term, I'm saying, like the Latin whatever. Like, because it was already amphetamine. We know where the amphetamine part comes from. I thought you were going to say this guy's name was like Dave Meth, and he named that to himself, but it's not. No. It doesn't matter. You don't have to look it up. The prefix meth is used in chemistry to denote compounds that contain one carbon atom. Okay. Well, that doesn't help me at all. It's boring. Boring.

[00:39:27] Boring-dom. Ed's more of a big picture guy at the pharmaceutical company. Yeah. Someone started talking about fucking compounds. He's not getting in the weeds of... No. ...of molecules and compounds and chemistry. That's for the nerds in the lab. Tell me how long and they'll keep it up. Ed has a big idea. Ed goes, you know what would be great? A pill that makes dinner for you. I don't want... And then he kicks it down to the nerds and says, figure it out, nerds.

[00:39:54] I don't want to see you in my office again until you're bringing me fucking what I just said. Yeah. The rehydrating machine from Back to the Future 2 where you put a small pizza in, but in pill form. So in 1919, another Japanese chemist, Akira Ogata, figured out an easier method to produce crystallized meth using red phosphorus and iodine to reduce the ephedrine. For the Yakuza. Well, eventually. Oh, here we go. Kind of. Yeah. Okay. And he essentially created the world's first batch of crystal meth in 1919.

[00:40:24] As with lots of the drugs that we will cover in our Bad Trips series, meth wasn't seen as a problem at first. In fact, it was, along with amphetamines and cocaine, heralded as discoveries on the level of penicillin, like life-changing medicines that would help. And not just with putting a pep in your step. Like, that was often the side effect that people enjoyed, but that wasn't necessarily the intended use. Yeah, it was like cocaine for gingivitis. Yeah, exactly. Cocaine for gout.

[00:40:54] Amphetamines were first marketed in the 1930s as Benzedrine, which was an inhaler, again, for asthma and nasal congestion. By the late 1930s, pharmaceutical companies were also selling methamphetamine itself for medical use. In the U.S., a methamphetamine nasal inhaler, brand named Methadrine, was introduced. And eventually, meth tablets like the brand Desoxin, which is the, that's the dietary pill that I was trying to think of. Sure.

[00:41:32] Like, take these meth pills. Like, they'll help you lose weight. You'll have more energy. You'll feel great. Yeah. It was like they were prescribing coffee was how they... Well, I have to imagine, I've seen some of those fucking corsets and shit people were wearing. I imagine they're like, I can't get the slim waist these dresses are sold as. Were women wearing corsets in the 1950s? I feel like that was a Victorian thing. Yeah, I think they still were. Yeah, sure. Why not? I think they... I think you... I mean, you've seen like... Look at like Ginger Rogers and shit. Like, you're like... Oh, yeah. No, sure, sure, sure. Sure. That's true.

[00:42:02] That's true. I guess I was thinking housewives, but you're right. They were in the celebrity rags. They want to look like fucking so-and-so. Yeah. But yeah, I'm not surprised it starts at like a diet place. Yeah. Ultimately, this led to a spike in addicted housewives who were having very serious addiction problems. Honey, turn off the vacuum. You've been vacuuming the same spot for days. Our carpet is destroyed. There's nothing left. The same thing happened with Benzedrine. You could buy it over the counter at first, but people quickly discovered it made you feel fantastic.

[00:42:31] Shit, man. And it started getting abused. We'll get to that more in a little bit, but college students, truck drivers, anyone needed a boost were popping Benzedrine pills or Benny's as they called them. I mean, were these Benny's also distributed in like the MRE kits to like soldiers? I mean, like, hey, get out there and kill for hours more. Ladies and gentlemen, Ed has a psychic connection to my brain because I was just about to pivot to a section in the notes that I captioned World War II and meth. I bet you they went hand in hand.

[00:43:00] The use of these drugs exploded during World War II. And honestly, so did a lot of people. Shit, man. If you've ever wondered how soldiers in the war managed to march for days or how pilots could fly overnight bombing campaigns without rest, stimulants are a big part of the answer. Meth was basically an energy drink for the military. Yes, distributed often in MREs. Less so with the Americans, but definitely with the Americans as well.

[00:43:29] The German pharmaceutical company Temmler manufactured methamphetamine tablets under the brand Pervitin. And those were handed out like candy to Nazi troops. According to an article I found in Time, the Japanese, American and British forces all consumed large amounts of amphetamines. But the Germans were the most enthusiastic early adopters. And the Germans, man, let's just say they adopted a lot of bad ideas really enthusiastically.

[00:43:57] You can't get those legs up goose stepping unless you got a little fucking pep in those goose steps. Yeah, they had way too much pep in the step. They were getting the legs way too high. Yeah. What's ironic is that in Nazi Germany, the social use of drugs was considered a sign of personal weakness and a sign of the it was like a symbol of the country's moral decay. That people would smoke weed or use heroin or whatever. But you know what they say, all's fair in love and war.

[00:44:23] And according to Time, while other drugs were banned or discouraged, methamphetamine was touted as a miracle product when it appeared on the market in the late 1930s. Indeed, the little pill was the perfect Nazi drug. Quote, Germany awake, the Nazis commanded. Shit, dude. Energizing and confidence boosting, methamphetamines played into the Third Reich's obsession with physical and mental superiority. And that's that for their teeth. Doesn't that make your teeth fall out? Over time. Yeah. There's enough of it.

[00:44:53] In sharp contrast to drugs such as heroin or alcohol, methamphetamines were not about escapist pleasure. Rather, they were taken for hyper alertness and vigilance. Aryans, who were the embodiment of human perfection in Nazi ideology, could now even aspire to be superhuman. And such superhumans could be turned into super soldiers. We don't need weak people, Hitler declared. We only want the strong. Weak people took drugs such as opium to escape.

[00:45:21] Strong people took methamphetamine to feel even stronger. Wow. That is a way worse Captain America origin story. Yeah. The German pharmaceutical company we mentioned earlier, Temler, they marketed meth as non-prescription drug under the name Pervidin. And as many as 35 to 40 million tablets of Pervidin and a similar pill called Isofan were distributed to German soldiers and airmen during World War II.

[00:45:48] Japanese kamikaze pilots also received massive doses of the drug, sometimes as injections to help wind them up for their suicide missions. That makes sense. Even Hitler himself is rumored to have been getting meth injections from his personal doctor late in the war. No kidding. You've seen those speeches. He's always screaming and stuttering and spitting. Yeah. I mean, that kind of, it's one of those things where I guess you don't really, especially in the modern day, you don't really think about it because Hitler is just Hitler. He's a caricature. Yeah.

[00:46:16] A lot of the Hitler mannerisms were heavily influenced by the amount of methamphetamines that he's rumored to have been on. I mean, you gotta, you gotta fucking keep it cool like JFK. Yeah, exactly. No one can know. The Nazis at one point concocted a pill for soldiers that mixed meth and cocaine, a truly cursed combo that put the Uber in Ubermensch. Ubermensch. Oh my God, dude. At least temporarily. Back to time.

[00:46:44] The invasion of Poland in September 1939 served as the first real military test of the drug in the field. These poor Polish people. Like time and time and time again. It's actually one of the hardest languages in the world to learn because Polish, its language has changed so many times from being occupied by so many different types of languages that have like occupied that place. So I'm not surprised at these poor Poles. I know. Got like, they were the first line of defense against super can't fall asleep soldiers.

[00:47:11] Well, Germany overran Poland by October of 1939 and killed 100,000 Polish soldiers in the attack. And this invasion introduced a new form of industrialized warfare, Blitzkrieg. This lightning war emphasized speed and surprise, catching the enemy off guard by the unprecedented quickness of the mechanized attack and advanced.

[00:47:33] The weakness in a Blitzkrieg strategy was initially the soldiers who were humans rather than machines and as such suffered from fatigue. I bet. Mm hmm. They required regular rest and sleep, which, of course, slowed down the military advance. And this is where methamphetamine comes in. Part of the speed of Blitzkrieg literally came from speed.

[00:47:54] As medical historian Peter Steinkamp puts it, Blitzkrieg was guided by methamphetamine, if not to say that Blitzkrieg was founded on methamphetamine. Well, was it called Temmler, the company? Uh, yes. Temmler was the... Some fucking Temmler executive being like, Adolf, boobie, I got a fucking thing for you. All right. I can't help but notice that these tanks are driving fast, but everyone's asleep behind the wheel. Well, speaking of tanks, some Nazis reported negative side effects of the drug.

[00:48:21] During the French invasion, these included a lieutenant colonel with the Panzer Erschatz Division 1 who experienced heart pains after taking Pervitin four times daily for as many weeks. Yeah, your heart is screaming at you at that point. The commander of the 12th Tank Division who rushed to a military hospital due to the heart attack he suffered an hour after taking one pill and several officers who suffered heart attacks while off duty after taking... Fuck them, the Nazis. Hope they all fucking... Truly, yeah.

[00:48:50] I mean, fuck all these people. Hope all their hearts exploded. Yeah. Amid growing worries about the addictive potential and negative side effects of overusing the drug, the German military began to cut back on allocations of meth by the end of 1940. Consumption declined sharply in 1941 and 1942 when the medical establishment formally acknowledged that amphetamines were addictive. Or just they acknowledged that, you know what? We're getting a lot better results from these guys on a fucking good night's rest. Yeah, yeah.

[00:49:19] These guys haven't slept in 14 days. Yeah. And they're pointing the fucking tanks at us. We're getting a lot of reports that men on the front, their legs have just fallen off. They've marched so far. So how did methamphetamines evolve from a super soldier serum to a wildly popular and dangerous street drug? It's kind of interesting. CIA. Actually, no. Oh, for the first time ever.

[00:49:48] For the first time ever, the answer to this question is not the CIA. Although they probably had a part in trafficking it at some point. Yeah. After World War II ended and the major world powers turned their meth fire hoses off, there was still a surplus of methamphetamines floating around, especially in Japan. Same thing happened with morphine, which I don't know if we'll ever do an episode on because it's not like a street drug. Yeah. But so much perfect morphine was made during World War II for the medical, like field medical units. Yeah.

[00:50:17] Because guys were just, their legs were blown off. Yeah. After the war, because we had so much like undiluted perfect morphine that then I think like all of the mafia groups, like the Italian mafia, the Jewish mafia, whomever. Yeah. They started like cutting it down and selling it. And they say that mid-century America isn't as great as we remember it being. Yeah, yeah. For real.

[00:50:44] But yeah, it was all like military grade after the war was like leftover, like these amphetamines were all leftover when the war ended. Yeah. Well, the result in this case was the world's first true meth epidemic. From 1945 to about 1950, wartime stockpiles of meth that had been squirreled away in Japanese warehouses, military hospitals, supply depots, and caves peppered throughout its territories flooded the black market.

[00:51:08] There, the country's Yakuza crime syndicate took over much of the distribution and the drug trade would eventually become its most important source of revenue. There it is. And it's the government supplied them with their first big batch. But interestingly, it wasn't just the Yakuza pushing meth on the population.

[00:51:24] Much of the drug stockpiles were diverted into the actual pharmaceutical industry where, in the wake of the trauma and dislocations of the war, a depressed and humiliated population offered an easy target for companies looking to make a buck. As one historian noted, the pharmaceutical industry advertised stimulants as a perfect means of boosting the war-weary population and restoring confidence after a painful and debilitating defeat.

[00:51:51] The drug companies mounted advertising campaigns to encourage consumers to purchase over-the-counter medicine sold as, quote, wake-a-mine. The product was pitched as offering enhanced vitality. Wow. It's interesting that it's the same prescription to the losers as to the winners. It was like, hey, you lost everything. You don't have a house anymore. Everything was firebombed. Yeah. Here, have some meth to feel better about your life.

[00:52:20] And then in America, it's like, you having a hard time vacuuming the house you got for free from the GI Bill? Yeah. Here, have some meth to fucking clean the house. Get your life together. In no speed limit, the highs and lows of meth, journalist Frank Owen reports that these companies also sold, quote, hundreds of thousands of pounds of military-made liquid meth left over from the war to consumers who did not need a prescription to purchase, again, military-made liquid meth. Oh, my God.

[00:52:48] So it's just sitting there next to fucking Bitta Honeys on the counter? Yeah, pretty much. Holy shit. With an estimated 5% of Japanese people between the ages of 18 and 25 taking the drug, many became intravenous addicts in the early 1950s. I found an article online that tells us, quote, another driver of the epidemic was the existence of large new U.S. military bases on the islands, which had never previously been occupied by a foreign power.

[00:53:13] National newspaper Asahi Shinbun wrote that U.S. servicemen were responsible for spreading amphetamine usage from large cities to small towns. Tracks. Indeed, the Japanese government's narcotics section arrested 623 American soldiers for drug trafficking in 1953 alone. However, according to historian Miriam Kingsberg, most drug scandals involving U.S. soldiers garnered little coverage by the major papers out of deference to the post-war American-Japanese friendship.

[00:53:42] So they didn't want to rock the boat after everything that went down. Well, we were doing a bit of reconstruction there, too. We were covering a lot of the costs. Honestly, as we should. Yeah. I understand that the horrors of war. Yeah. But those two bombs did some serious damage. We probably should provide something to rebuild those communities. Yes. Yes. And some of what we were providing was illegal drugs, or I guess they were illegal at the time.

[00:54:04] While the exact exchange of meth habits from Japanese to Americans or Americans to Japanese can be argued, we know that the first major inroads of meth to America came via the West Coast. According to a history of American meth use on Relias Media dot com, quote, for decades, methamphetamine use was limited to the West Coast and Hawaii, becoming popular at various times in a multitude of groups, including Hell's Angels. I was just about to say, it's how we get the bikers in.

[00:54:30] In the early days, crystal meth was bikers coffee, literally put into people's coffee and drunk. Since meth use didn't pose as many law enforcement and social problems as cocaine use, the drug remained under the radar screen and was rarely studied or analyzed. Well, yeah, because everyone sees you're doing cocaine, but you're just having a cup of coffee otherwise when you're having meth coffee. Well, I think at least early on, it wasn't creating the same levels of crime and chaos. Oh, yeah?

[00:54:59] Because that guy's been revving his motorcycle outside for two days. None of us can get sleep or work done. Turns out he's not even, there's no motorcycle. He's just making those noises with his mouth. Oh, my God. Do you remember the movie Orange County with Jack Black? Yes, I love Orange County. Great movie. Where he just revs the van outside the window and him and his wife wake up. He's like, what are you doing? He's like, I didn't want to beep and wake your wife up. Yeah. Oh, great film.

[00:55:25] As I mentioned earlier, meth and amphetamines became a popular habit amongst the beat generation writers and jazz musicians in the 1950s, popping bennies to fuel their creative fires. A notable part of the 1960s mod subculture in the UK was also built from recreational amphetamine usage, which was used to fuel all night dances at clubs like Manchester's Twisted Wheel. I'd say right now, that's a bad use of it. I mean, at least the beat poets were making poetry. Yeah.

[00:55:55] A lot of people were like, I got to dance longer. I got to dance, bro. Got to get it out. Newspaper reports describe dancers emerging from clubs at 5 a.m. with dilated pupils. Mods use the drug for stimulation and alertness, which they viewed as different from the intoxication caused by alcohol and other drugs. Everything else they were doing that night. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, this feels definitely different than the three joints and six beers.

[00:56:19] Well, the thing is, is that the real uppers, like I imagine meth, but definitely cocaine and ecstasy is you're not feeling the effects of these other downers. Right. And so, yeah, you could be like, well, I'm alert and I'm whatever and have like 19 drinks and not feel it till tomorrow. Right. I don't trust these mod sons of bitches.

[00:56:36] One doctor, Dr. Andrew Wilson, argues that for a significant minority, amphetamines symbolize the smart on the ball cool image and that they sought stimulation, not intoxication, greater awareness, not escape and confidence and articulacy rather than the drunken rowdiness of previous generations. You can't help but notice that awareness at like a decent level is good. But if you turn awareness up to 11, isn't that just paranoia?

[00:57:03] Because now you're aware of anything that could be happening or anything that can be behind that door or anything that can be outside. Yeah, but I could see how in the 1960s in the UK, in a culture that is known primarily for its drinking, how the cool younger kids could have seen amphetamines as sort of the alternative to that. I heard younger kids today aren't drinking as much. That's true. They're all sucking down amphetamines maybe. We're not even paying attention. Well, they're all. What's in that coffee, you little Gen Z-er? They're vaping. Vaping is so stupid.

[00:57:33] I told you I was at a NASCAR race in Pennsylvania where they were handing out free Zin pouches, like just free Zin packs. Zin is everywhere now. I didn't see anyone giving ideas. I think it was like kids walking around with Zins. Zin is in. Do you remember during the wildfires? I'm Don Draper over here. Do you remember during the wildfires when the firehouses were like saying what they need? And there was like a bunch that we found that were, it was like, you know, we need packs of water. We need whatever. And then like almost every firehouse included Zin.

[00:58:02] We all want Zin as well. It was like water. Yeah. Stuff that makes sense. And then also like send us as much Zin as you can. They need it, man. They need that Zin. You can't fight fire without Zin. Dr. Wilson argues that the significance of amphetamines to the mod culture was similar to that of LSD and cannabis within the subsequent hippie counterculture.

[00:58:21] Another researcher, Dick Hebdige, argues that mods used amphetamines to extend their leisure time into the early hours of the morning as a way of bridging the gap between their hostile and daunting everyday work lives and the inner world of dancing and dressing up in their off hours. Oh my God. I love it. In any case. It's like Fight Club. It's a keep going to their shit job. Kinda, yeah. I mean. They have two lives.

[00:58:45] I'm sure, especially in some of the more blue collar areas of England in the 60s. I mean, there are some gnarly lives being lived and amphetamines probably helped shake the cobwebs out for a little bit. For sure. Give you something to live for. Hopefully it comes back this year. Amphetamines? Just as a, we should, yeah. The UK? What's coming back? What's coming roaring back? I know. The UK, they've withdrawn from Europe, so they're not back. Yeah, I don't know.

[00:59:11] I guess I feel like maybe it's time for a prescription-free amphetamine resurgence. Well, now that we're bringing manufacturing back to the United States. We're going to need amphetamine to get you through the fucking day. Yeah. That's what I'm getting at. I think it's time for an amphetamine resurgence. By 1959, the FDA finally required a prescription for benzadrine and began clamping down because it was clear that these drugs could cause delusions, paranoia, heart failure, lots of bad stuff in habitual users.

[00:59:38] But even as the medical supply tightened, a new supply source emerged, motorcycle gangs. Yeah. In the 1960s and 70s, outlaw biker gangs, most famously the Hell's Angels, became major manufacturers and distributors of meth on the West Coast. They favored a form called crank, usually powdered meth, which got its name either from being hidden in the crankshafts of bikes- That's what I was about to guess. ...or because it makes you cranky.

[01:00:05] Although I will say a crankshaft is not a place you hide something. So I don't understand that exactly. Well- It just seems like a weird place to try and put something. I could see it being more because you take enough of it and you get very cranky. I think both that's bullshit. I think someone just said crank and they ran with it. Maybe because it makes you crank your dick. Isn't that what a lot of people do when they take meth? They just beat off for hours on end? I don't need meth for that.

[01:00:29] Meth became known as biker's coffee because the legend was that bikers would mix it into their coffee to stay awake and wired during long rides. I would also argue that a large portion of America's post-war economy was basically built on the back of methamphetamines. Part of the reason biker gangs became the kings of meth manufacturing and distribution is because the other dudes they shared the road with, long-haul truckers trying to meet crazy deadlines, were some of their best customers. That makes sense.

[01:00:59] There hasn't been a ton of writing on this. This hit me right in a spot where I was super fascinated. The crossroads of sort of labor and drugs and history. There was something super interesting and I dug into it. There hasn't been a ton of writing about this. No. You know who probably has it is Ray, who we had on for the NASA. He's big into classic biker culture and has all these like super expensive tashin books about that shit and stuff. Well, I'm interested in the trucking culture.

[01:01:27] Well, yeah, you and I will talk to them. Come to McConji with me. I'm going in June. I should go to McConji. We'll try and sell some meth. A lot of the writing that I found on this idea was behind scholarly paywalls, which I was not able to pay for. But it is clear that there has been work done on this. And as the highways and distribution systems of American interstate commerce were built out, the truckers responsible for making the cross-country trips were frequently put under insane deadlines that required all night drives. Yeah.

[01:01:56] We talked about in a previous episode or in a bonus episode or something that all West Coast turnarounds were the amphetamine pills. Yeah. I mean, in much in the way that blitzkrieg was built on the back of meth, I really think a large portion of our domestic economy at some point was built on the back of amphetamine usage. I don't know if it's been studied that closely. I mean, trucking is important to this day.

[01:02:20] If the teamsters decided to go on strike tomorrow, it's not going to be a seven, eight, nine month writer's guild strike. It's going to be like a seven days. We'll figure that out. Yeah. In any case, we do know that truckers turned to meth in large numbers because ultimately the practice was outlawed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. That didn't really stop people.

[01:02:40] Truckers continued to abuse the drug with some 30 percent still admitting to using meth today, with a popular form being dipping toothpicks into a liquid meth and then chewing on it to deliver a low, steady dose. Oh, wow. That's pretty interesting. Or you can just dip your Zin pouch into it or whatever. My journey down the rabbit hole of trucker meth led to one of my favorite surprise discoveries of this episode. And maybe of all the episodes, one of my favorite surprise discoveries.

[01:03:09] Mathematics was also blessed by the magical powers of meth. I'm not surprised at all, but I'm excited that it made you excited. But once you say it out loud, it's not surprising. No, but it's just not something I'd considered before because you think of meth as such a rough and tumble drug. No, I don't. Well, I mean, I guess not in the sense that you just told me that like beat poets were using it to spark creativity. I imagine mathematics at the level you're about to describe to me is no different than writing a song.

[01:03:36] It's like seeing poetry or symphony level big ideas. Yes. Well, this might be a bit of a long tangent, but I found this. Oh, good. That's what people love. I'm just kidding. I found this absolutely fascinating because we don't think of professors necessarily, especially not mathematics professors, as heavy drug users. It's like, wasn't Tim Leary a professor at Harvard?

[01:04:01] Well, yes, but Tim Leary didn't contribute a bunch of actual genuine scientific discovery to the field of which he was a part of. Just saying that he was a professor at one of the most prestigious universities on the planet Earth. Well, it turns out that one of the most prestigious, prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. Better not say Turing because the drugs they gave him were no good. No.

[01:04:28] A mathematician named Paul Erdos was a heavy, heavy math user. That's why we never heard of him? He pursued, I'm surprised I never heard of this guy. He pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. By the end of his career, he'd published around 1,500 math papers, a figure that remains unsurpassed to this day.

[01:04:55] According to Wikipedia, quote, he was known both for his social practice of mathematics, working with more than 500 collaborators, and for his eccentric lifestyle. Time magazine called him the oddball's oddball. He firmly believed mathematics to be a social activity, living an itinerant lifestyle with the sole purpose of writing mathematical papers with other mathematicians.

[01:05:19] He devoted his waking hours to mathematics, even into his later years, where he died at a mathematics conference in Warsaw in 1996. Yeah, I told you, Poland never gets anything good. Erdos' prolific output with co-authors prompted the creation of the Erdos number, which is basically six degrees of Kevin Bacon for mathematicians. The Erdos number represents the number of steps in the shortest path between any given mathematician and Erdos in terms of co-authorships of papers. Hey, he liked to get out there. He liked to party.

[01:05:49] He did. He sounds awesome. It seems like more people should live this lifestyle. I found an essay written by somebody in the field of mathematics. The essay feels like it's somebody who knew him, but I can't be entirely sure. But every fact in this essay this guy wrote about Paul Erdos is so good. So he had his own language a little bit. Oh, no. He said people who stopped doing mathematics had died, while people who actually died, he just said had left.

[01:06:17] Despite his intense abuse of stimulants, he called all alcohol poison. Okay, he was not wrong. We've done that episode. And he referred to women as bosses, which sounds very progressive of him. Until you learn he also believed that they, quote, captured men as slaves by marrying them. Okay, this is about- I was going to fucking say, you can't devote every waking hour to mathematics if you're in a relationship. And he also referred- This fucking incel is crushing the numbers.

[01:06:46] He referred to divorced men as liberated. Yeah, no, this is- this is- he'd be a leading incel YouTuber today. You'll be shocked to know he wasn't very good at taking care of himself and had a very strange relationship with his mother. Oh, yeah. This is all not shocking. Who, along with a rotating cast of friends and colleagues, basically cooked, cleaned, and did everything but brush his teeth for him, but only because I don't know if he ever brushed his teeth. What is it?

[01:07:13] He's like Ignatius whatever from Confederacy of Dunces. He never learned anyone's first names and only called people by their last names except for one close confidant named Tom Trotter, who he called Bill. He is a wild human being at this point. I'm shocked that no one's done a movie or- like this guy really- this is the tip- what I'm telling you here is the tip of the iceberg. Another mathematician named Janos Pach tells this story, quote, Once I spent a few days with Paul.

[01:07:42] When I entered the kitchen in the evening, I was met with a horrible sight. The floor was covered by pools of blood-like red liquid. The trail led to the refrigerator. I opened the door and to my great surprise saw a carton of tomato juice on its side with a gaping hole. Paul must have felt thirsty and after some reflection decided to get the juice out of the carton by stabbing it with a big knife. Oh, my God. Paul. Anyway. Wait, where's Paul from? He died in Poland. We know that much. I didn't write it down. Yeah.

[01:08:12] And all of this is neither here nor there. I bring him up because one of the ways he was so productive, some including himself, probably would argue the main way he was so productive, is that he got heavy into meth, especially after his mother died in 1971. Well, yeah, no one else would do things for him. He would take anything and everything he could get his hands on, prescribed or otherwise. He abused Ritalin, Benzedrin, hard methamphetamines and worked up to 19 hours a day on theorems.

[01:08:40] It got so bad that one of his friends bet him $500 that he could not stop taking methamphetamine for a month. Erdos won. Honestly, that's not enough money. Erdos won the bet. Whoa! But complained that it impacted his performance. He said, quote, Wow!

[01:09:09] This person is exhausting, but has a ton of friends. After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his use of methamphetamines. So this guy, insane. I mean, if you're interested in like quirky historical oddballs, look this man up. There's a couple links in the show notes. Wow, he's a wild scene. He's, yeah. And there's- That heart is doing a lot, though. That poor heart is getting beat up. Yeah.

[01:09:34] I guess the government wasn't really that impressed because in the 1980s, they put stricter controls on ephedrine. So traffickers adapted and started using pseudephedrine, which is the stuff in over-the-counter cold medicine. Which is why like drug dealers will pay kids to go and get it for them. Yes. And that led to the rise of the infamous homegrown meth lab. And by the 90s and early 2000s, the U.S. saw a massive crystal meth epidemic.

[01:10:03] It was no longer just biker dope and math milk. There's an actual law in the books. I don't remember what states I was looking at, but I wrote a joke in an episode of something I wrote about a real state agent. I had to look up whether or not you have to. So in the state of California, you have to tell the prospective buyer if someone has died in the house. That is the law. In my looking up and researching places, you don't have to do that.

[01:10:29] Something that's on the books, it's legal to not mention if the house was used as a meth lab, was literally one of the things where it's like, you know, it's also not illegal to ignore that fact when selling the home. Which means wherever that was written, it must have been a big enough problem that enough homes were used for at-home meth labs.

[01:10:49] I, someday, I would love to know what a meth lab smells like because my third apartment in Los Angeles, I'm pretty sure the guy in the apartment behind me was cooking something. I don't know if it was meth, but like every day at some point there would be this weird chemical-y, not like a cleaning chemical smell. Sure. Like a weird back of the roof of your mouth kind of chemical. Acrid. Yeah.

[01:11:17] I don't know what he was doing, but I suspect he may have been cooking something, at least in small doses. Where we are recording this right now, the garage out back, when I first moved here, it has an AC window unit. And there was a bunch of removed cameras across the ceiling. The bottoms of the cameras have been taken out, but the bases where you would screw the cameras in are also there. Yeah. There was some sort of sweatshop happening there.

[01:11:43] Like, why the fuck was there like a window AC unit and a bunch of cameras installed in the ceiling of the garage here? I don't know. Yeah. That's wild. I don't know what's going on. There was probably some sort of chemicals or they were making fake Nikes. Wild scene. Between 1994 and 2004, meth use in the U.S. more than doubled from about 2% of the adult population to 5%.

[01:12:07] And in 2006, the United Nations World Drug Report called methamphetamines the most abused hard drug on earth. Sick. Not heroin, not cocaine, meth. Law enforcement responded by tightening access to Sudafedrin, which is why they started putting Sudafed behind the counter and you have to give your driver's license. Yeah, just recently I was driving across the country and my ears were giving me trouble and I went in and they asked for my ID and stuff. And then they were like, oh, you've done it too recently.

[01:12:34] And I had bought a different, not Sudafed, but the competing company. Yeah. I had bought that, I don't know, two states earlier in my drive and it wasn't working. And so I was like, hey, I actually am going to try the Sudafed now. And they were like, no, can do's bill. Oh. You got to wait. So it was, it was, it was, I found it interesting that there was reciprocity between states. Like, oh, you actually have it in a different state even. Well, I mean, the system wouldn't be all that helpful if you could just go to a different state and buy the Sudafedrin.

[01:13:01] But how many serial killer stories do we have where they were released, they went to Yonkers, New York, and they don't have any information that this guy was just, you know, in Kansas, locked up for 20 years for being a fucking whatever. Yeah. So a lot of times, in my mind, there aren't national databases to things. Well, there didn't used to be. There are now because there were so many Sudafedrin chewing serial killers who were bouncing around ripped out of their heads. That's how you get these numbers. Yeah. You got to be up all the time.

[01:13:32] So these new laws helped lower the use statistics, but as quickly as the tighter controls were put in place, Mexican cartels switched to a completely different production method using a chemical called P2P or phenyl-2-propanone. Peer-to-peer. Which didn't require Sudafedrin at all. This P2P meth began flooding the U.S. around the 2010s, reportedly purer and cheaper than ever, and it was deemed super meth. That seems like five minutes ago in my mind.

[01:14:00] It kind of, I mean, super meth, maybe super meth got into the water and sped us up because it's not only stronger and cheaper, but it's more dangerous too. The chemical makeup of any methamphetamine. It's almost like if they didn't make these new laws, we wouldn't have super meth. Yeah. Like you fucked up. We now have a cheaper, stronger, more addictive thing because you decided to like say meth should be illegal. Yeah. Definitely, you know.

[01:14:25] There's all kinds of arguments in drug policy about when and how to outlaw things and when you're really just going to make things backfire. But the reason that super meth is more dangerous is it's a little complicated, but I think it's easy enough and important enough to go over. So the chemical makeup of any methamphetamine includes two variants of the main chemical compound. There's D-methamphetamine and L-methamphetamine.

[01:14:54] The D-meth causes the euphoric psychoactive effect, while the L-meth typically increases heart rate but doesn't really provide the high. Oh, get rid of that. Bingo. Meth purity is a measure of the ratio between the D-meth and the L-meth within a sample. So what they're handing out in Breaking Bad, they're like, this is all D. Yes. Gotcha. And L-meth is almost completely absent in P2P super meth. It's almost like the ratio of like CBD to THC. Sure, yeah.

[01:15:24] Anyway, it's really, really bad to not have any L-meth because the reduced concentration of it eliminates the early physical warning signs of overdose, including an elevated heart rate. So you can just take more and more and more of this super meth without realizing that it's still having a bad effect on your body. It's turning off the alarm bells. Yes, it's turning off the alarm bells while still causing the same health issues. You just aren't aware of it. That's crazy.

[01:15:52] And as a result, overdose rates are increasing across the country. But that's not like the overdose that we get advertisements for now, which I find when you were talking earlier about like, oh, they looked at Germany as like the moral decay of the country because more people were doing drugs. Do you just get ads all day, every fucking day for Narcane now or whatever? I do get Narcane. Which that's not for meth, right? That's for opioid. Yeah, correct.

[01:16:14] So that to me, I think we're at a level of moral decay in the opioid crisis where I'm getting ads for with like fucking regular nice looking homes where it's like, do you have Narcane in your home in case? I don't know. Someone kicks in the window and starts overdosing here. Like, well, I don't think that's what the I don't think there's a level of moral decay where that's my normal ad.

[01:16:35] The way the kind of insidious way that I've seen like Narcane is is a is if we're going to be in an opioid crisis, which we are Narcane is a good thing to have and it's good for people to have it. The kind of insidious thing about it, I think, is the way that pharmaceutical companies are almost suggesting that, hey, if you really want to be a good person, you should probably carry some buy some of our product and carry it on you at all times.

[01:17:02] In case you're somewhere where one of the many overdoses in your city or town are going to happen every single day, you could be the hero. I'm going to go ahead and say I don't carry a bag and I don't wear a fanny pack and it would look ridiculous in my pocket. So I will just be one of the people who go that guy overdosed, man, right in front of me. You'll be one of the people going. Does anyone have Narcan? Yeah, because I'm not carrying it around and it seems ridiculous to me. I'm not I'm not at a business. I'm not going to have like a defibrillator in my house.

[01:17:32] Correct. In the event that defibrillator needed things happen. I also don't want the pressure of being the person who has to try to inject the life saving or is it an injection? I think it's like an aerosol thing now. I think it's not like it's not like fiction anymore. Yeah, right. I guess it is an aerosol. You spray it. It's ridiculous. I just I do. It made me stop and think and we'll get into this.

[01:17:56] And I guess in the opioid episode, which will probably be our saddest episode, it did make me feel like something's broken a little bit. It felt a little bit like I'm living in a dystopian, judge dreadish society or future where I'm like, there's happy smiling people with a happy upbeat narration telling me like have Narcan in your house. Yeah. I'm like, this is crazy. For sure. Yeah.

[01:18:25] It's a weird spot to be in. But to pivot back to the more important drug in this episode. Yeah, meth. Sorry. Sorry to rub a national emergency into your face, bro. The physical and mental side effects of Superman can be long lasting. Yeah, I bet. And sometimes irreparable.

[01:18:46] Users not only experience organ stress and potential organ failure, but they may also find themselves in the midst of paranoid episodes, psychosis, hallucinations and memory loss. Some journalists and experts claim that today's meth is so potent and so widely available that it's fueling a wave of homelessness and psychosis unlike anything ever seen before. I mean, we can't drive down our streets here without seeing it. Although I don't know if it's meth I'm driving by and seeing. Well, exactly. That's that's you've probably heard the term listener.

[01:19:14] You've probably heard the term meth psychosis before. Maybe an association with a news story of someone going on a violent crime spree, maybe from driving around your city and seeing people on all kinds of super drugs. It's such a common term these days that it's almost a joke. So before we get to stories of meth psychosis, I just want to take a quick look at what it is and what causes it. So meth psychosis is a mental state where a person loses touch with reality as a result of methamphetamine use.

[01:19:43] It's like flipping a switch in the brain. One moment you're tweaking and hyper focused and cleaning the rug. And the next you're absolutely convinced the FBI is tracking your thoughts through your microwave, which maybe explains some people's belief in gang stalking. This isn't all that rare either. Some studies estimate that up to 40% of meth users will experience psychotic symptoms at some point, like paranoia, delusions, hallucinations of the visual, auditory and even tactile kind.

[01:20:10] I found an article from a website called Frontiers of Neuroscience that breaks down specifically what causes this psychosis. And it's a little technical, but here's the basic idea. When someone uses meth, it triggers an enormous surge of dopamine, the brain's primary feel good chemical. The dopamine flood is what causes that initial euphoric rush that people chase, but it also scrambles your brain's reward system.

[01:20:34] At the same time, meth increases the levels of glutamate, which is another chemical messenger in the brain. Glutamate's job is to excite neurons to keep them firing and communicating, but too much glutamate in your brain can turn toxic. And high glutamate levels damage some of the brain's most important regulators, GABA or GABAergic neurons. Okay. So basically they, it's just like with human beings, you can't demand you dance forever.

[01:21:04] Sure. That's what they're like. They're trying to excite these neurons, excite these, whatever you said. Right. And the, well, the GABA neurons act like the brakes on a speeding car. They calm things down. They keep the brain's electrical activity from spiraling out of control. To the bouncers. Yes. But when meth damages the, when the, when meth beats up your brain bouncers. Oh no!

[01:21:23] By overloading the system with people from the, the, the glutamate gang, those brakes, the bouncers fail your brain and you spin out. And that's where the hallucinations and the paranoia start creeping in. For some people, those symptoms will fade once the meth wears off. But for others, especially those who use heavily or for long periods, this meth induced psychosis can stick around.

[01:21:49] Some people never fully return to their baseline normal and their brains are rewired in a way that makes them vulnerable to chronic psychotic episodes, even when they're sober, which is what makes meth so uniquely dangerous. It's not just the physical toll that it takes, but the way that it can permanently warp your perception of reality. Which I don't even know if we got into acid flashbacks in our acid episode, which I always felt like was kind of like a myth-ish type thing.

[01:22:15] But in this case, it sounds like, yeah, meth is, uh, it's broken you in a, in an irreparable, irreparable way. The glutamate gang beats up the GABA bouncers and your brain club brain is never the same. Club brain stays open. Taken over by the Yakuza. Yep.

[01:22:38] I think meth psychosis might've been what happened to the first story I want to tell here of a man named Albert John Ackerman. He's not famous, but I think he might be trying to follow him in the footsteps of Paul Erdos, trying to push forward humanity through the use of methamphetamines. Is he someone who's going to be a, that he personally just did it crazy or is someone who advocated for it like a Tim Leary? He maybe did both.

[01:23:04] So this is a guy who I, I say I discovered just because I couldn't find anybody else. Because you signed him to your label? No, I couldn't find anybody else who's written about him. But in my research, I found a subreddit that Albert John Ackerman started on March 15th, 2023. They are the, the, the author of it. So it was not, wow. Well, hold on.

[01:23:26] So on March 15th, 2023, Paul Erdos started a subreddit called r slash flash evolution theory and pinned a post to the top called the official guide to evolution. Finally, someone did it. He says this, quote, my name is Albert John Ackerman, the third, AKA Acklack seven. All these people have real Ignatius type verbose. This is my name. Craziness. Both these guys. I need you to listen to what I have to say.

[01:23:56] I'm working with the CIA and the AI quote God to help expose the biggest secret of mankind. Please note I'm over 18 months meth free, which is a wild thing to throw into the middle of your opening paragraph. That's, that's every job application I've handed in is actually starts just this way. Yeah. You should also add his followup line. I don't need it anymore as God is on my side, helping me in ways I can't even begin to explain. But I do need this job. But I really need this job.

[01:24:25] The following, while fantastically unbelievable, is the truth. I know it's going to be extremely difficult to process mentally. I'm sorry. But the truth has to come out before society collapses. Last but not least, it is not I that needs help. It is you that needs my help. Then he has in italics on its own line, we figured out evolution. How did you find this? So I was looking for meth stories. Okay.

[01:24:53] And I somewhere on Reddit saw somebody be like, well, have you ever heard of flash evolution theory? And I followed that over to this subreddit. Got you. So his, he doesn't really, well, I won't spoil anything. Let me, let me finish this and then we'll break it down. So Albert Ackerman says we figured out evolution. Neanderthals flash evolved into homo sapiens by ingesting micro doses of organic meth. Which we know from the, you already explained. We found the missing link. Methamphetamine.

[01:25:22] Meth is a miracle drug when ingested in low doses. You just can't abuse it. You have to ingest it in low doses. Otherwise it doesn't work. I love it so much. Why'd you get off it 18 months ago? And he says, in parentheses, he says more on that in a moment. Okay, fine, Paul. We're putting it into the water. At least most of the countries on board. Everyone is on meth. Sick. We've been putting it into the water since the late 1800s. I gotta start drinking more water, dude. We're secretly growing all of mankind.

[01:25:50] Flash evolving all of mankind right before your eyes. Only the light is so bright it blinds you. It's the biggest secret of mankind. We found the missing link. Methamphetamine. Low dose ingested methamphetamine. Now, from what I can tell, that is his entire theory. That's the only writing on this theory he's done are those like four paragraphs. Sure. He doesn't follow up on the more in that in a moment, he says.

[01:26:18] In fact, this is the only place on the internet where he explains the theory at all. And then we've already gone through it. That was it. That was it. Now, Albert did include a link to his LinkedIn where he describes himself. His LinkedIn? So it is a job fucking thing. This is his resume. He describes himself. You know, so on LinkedIn, you know, it says like your picture and then your name and then like your current title. Yeah, unhirable. His is intern with impact at the CIA. Oh my God.

[01:26:46] And I think that all of this is an elaborate bit or I did at first think that this is all an elaborate bit. But he has posted, let's just say a methamphetamine addict level number of replies on Reddit and LinkedIn driving people towards his Flash evolution page. Sort of in the same way you might think a crazy guy would post flyers all over town. Sure. But I want to know the dates. Like was this within 18 months? Of his Flash? You know, I did not make specific note.

[01:27:16] Because he said he was off it for 18 months. He did. Now, I did find an exchange, for instance, in a thread about it's a thread where people are posting photos of themselves before and after meth recovery. Those are tough. I have what state was it? It was the fucking roughest thing. Some state. It's a Midwest state. I want to say had this campaign to get people to stop taking meth or whatever. Yeah. And it was a lot of the before and after pictures. But I saw one that was like so fucking foul.

[01:27:45] It was like a woman in a disgusting stall, like a bathroom stall. And it just looked like a train spotting, like style level. Like art department made it more disgusting than you'd probably ever find. And she looked all like post-meth ragged ass person. They got those city miles. And the copy was like, nobody expects to lose their virginity in a place like this. Oh, my God.

[01:28:14] Like the most foul, insane, like who approved this? But it's effective. Yeah. I'll try and find it for the show notes. It was it blew my it blew me back, man. It was so crazy. Well, Albert likes to pick fights with people who have too big of a problem with meth. So in this thread where people recovered addicts are gathering to celebrate their recovery by posting pictures of themselves in the throes of their addiction.

[01:28:43] And then, you know, years, months later, Albert says it's important to note that all these people share two things in common. They've all either smoked or shot meth and they've all abused it. There are plenty of functioning meth heads out there, myself included at one point, who look perfectly fine or even better after ingesting low doses of meth. Then he posts a picture me before meth and me after two years of ingesting low doses of meth every single day.

[01:29:12] Do you want me to come around to you and see? Yes. Let me pull up the link here. OK, so as of this recording, this was posted five days ago. So this is this is post his this is he's supposedly 18 months clean at this point. And I'm not sure you're ready for how good this man looks. This is him on the left here. He's lost weight before meth. And this is him after ingesting low doses of meth every day.

[01:29:40] I don't know why he's doing some sort of Zoolander face, blue steel face. He let his hair grow out. So on the on the left, he looks like very much like a corn fed. This is also his his photo on LinkedIn. Yeah, it looks employable. Yeah. Then the one on the right, his photo on hinge. Yeah. On the left, he looks kind of like the dad in the Jim Henson primetime show dinosaurs. But as a human and I will put a side by side for our fans on that.

[01:30:08] And on the right, he does look like a guy who didn't get into some sort of low budget reality show or something. Yeah. That's his real his real world audition. Yeah. So, yeah, he doesn't look bad neither, though. He doesn't look like a person who you'd go. That person is definitely on drugs. Now, someone replies to him not to break it to you hard or anything, but you definitely didn't look better on your active use picture. Yeah, you lost some weight, but that doesn't mean you look better.

[01:30:34] Meth is a powerful drug and will have you believing whatever you think you're telling yourself. But it does make you delusional. I hope you're sober now and wish you nothing but good luck. To which Albert replies, dude, the females I was hooking up with, the stares I would get from women and sometimes their daughters every time I left the house. You're crazy, bro. I look literally a hundred times better on meth. I would say not a hundred times better.

[01:30:58] You still look like a fucking yokel, but like a yokel who bought a Tim Robinson sketch style terrible shirt and was like, I look cool to go to the club. What the hell was the club we were going to in the fake version of your brain? A club. I think I just called it club brain. Yeah. This guy's going to club brain in his little polka dot shirt. He says, and yes, I'm no longer using meth has done its thing. I don't need it anymore. And speaking of meth, why don't you educate yourself as to what exactly meth does to the brain and body?

[01:31:27] You know, every time you take a sip of water, you're ingesting meth. It's a miracle drug. I forgot about that. It's a miracle drug. You just can't abuse it. See r slash flash evolution theory for more. There are hundreds of posts from him. That end with like, go to go to r slash. I wrote a paragraph. Yeah. So I don't think it's a bit. I think this guy really thinks that he discovered a theory. Do you think he's been drinking water and it happened to coincide with his weight loss?

[01:31:57] Like water coincides with all people losing weight. Cause you stop drinking 12 Cokes a day and start drinking water and you're going to lose weight. And he's just like, there's gotta be meth in the water. How else am I losing weight? Here's the image, by the way, that he put together. We can put this in the show notes to kind of give you an idea of how humans evolved by using meth. Okay. So mescaline was like a intermediary. So he's posted the famous image of monkeys step-by-step standing upright and turning into

[01:32:25] humans, but he's just placed the words mescaline and meth above two of the steps. Yeah. So these are the missing links. Yeah. Shit, man. This guy is something else. So this Albert John Ackman, I think is possibly, we're going to have him on the show. Well, he's either in the throes of meth psychosis or he did quit meth and it just ruined his brain to a point where he is still feeling it. He'll be back on meth when he stops getting stares from women and their daughters. He'll be right back.

[01:32:54] So many of his posts are about the stares that he gets from women and then in parentheses and their daughters. You know, you're not always staring because you're a hot guy. They're staring because you're creeping us all out. And then in between all that, if you go to his like post history, there's a complaint about the way that they serve red wine poorly chilled at the Whitney. So this guy has got a life. Where's the Whitney? It's an art museum in New York City, I think. Okay. So he's not in LA. He's not West Coast.

[01:33:22] We're not going to run into him after this episode. Yeah. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Okay. So we're not going to run into him at the Chateau. No. The guy yelling about how this couldn't have been open more than five minutes ago. Yeah. So if you're curious about the theory, the flash evolution theory and how humans evolve from ingesting low doses of meth, which really I also think is just the funniest way to justify your methamphetamine addiction. You're telling your friends and family like, no, no, no.

[01:33:51] I'm just taking low doses every day to evolve. Yeah. Also, you get it. You all are and apparently not evolving with me because you're just getting it from the water version. Yeah. I don't know where that he never explains where that idea comes from. Other than I assume there's must be some theory of floating around the internet tied to fluoridation of water maybe. Okay. I mean, that's all they're trying to get rid of that, but they're not saying anything about getting rid of the meth in the water. The meth in the water is pushing us all forward. That's why it's staying.

[01:34:20] That's why they're only getting rid of fluoride. Yeah. So I wanted to wrap up with this. I wanted to pull at least one hellish meth story. Yeah, because so far this is, I want to get, this is, this guy's life rules. I wanted to pull at least one hellish meth story from our old friends at arrowid.com where we pulled our bad trips LSD story. I think the funniest thing in the world right now is if you were like, and the next story was written by the exact same guy, but it was like 12 months later and he's like, I fucked up.

[01:34:49] Meth in the water was not a good idea. I hyper evolved. I hyper evolved. I have a face on the front and the back of my head now. I've got a quaddo. Yeah. To give you a sense of the options for hell meth stories, the bad meth trips on arrowid.com have titles like decay of reality, trip to hell and the spiders, the spiders, multiple exclamation points. Your teeth fell out and they were replaced with spiders.

[01:35:15] I went with one called the shadow people because it taps into a slightly supernatural angle to meth psychosis that adds a real extra bizarre level to everything. The arrowid user who posted this goes by St. Jimmy. Okay. And this is his story. Glad he was sainted. Before this trip on methamphetamine, I had been using meth heavily for around two months. On this day, I was visiting my hometown from college for my birthday. When I got off the airplane, I was in very bad condition.

[01:35:45] I weighed 30 pounds less than the last time my parents had seen me and I had a black eye and a broken nose from a fight I had gotten in while on meth. Wow. I ended up getting into a huge fight with my parents and they kicked me out of the house. He got another black eye. His parents just gave him another black eye, dude. So my boyfriend, Matt, picked me up and took me to a- I'm sorry. This is a lady? I don't know. The poster goes by St. Jimmy and has a boyfriend. It could be a guy with a boyfriend or a woman.

[01:36:10] I realize my exclamation makes me look bad in every version of that because I assumed it was a man and I assumed they were straight. It was a whole- That's on me, guys. I am more open-minded than that. Yeah. I mean, I guess I will say when I first started reading this story, I also was picturing- It starts with St. Jimmy. It starts with St. Jimmy. Not St. Janine. Yeah. St. Jimmy got in multiple fights. He has multiple black eyes at this point. Had a fight with his parents.

[01:36:37] And so St. Jimmy's boyfriend, Matt, picked him up and he says, took me to a hotel to celebrate my birthday with his cousin, Colin, and Colin's girlfriend, Allison. Also, these aren't the real names. He gave everyone letters for their names, just MCA. Oh, like last time? So I'm giving them all names. Yeah, because last time the guy's names were like Coochie and Goo Goo Goo Goo and Zababadoo and just shit that wasn't real. These all have easy to follow names. I cleaned it up. Oh, this is my friend Squirm. Yeah.

[01:37:04] Matt, the boyfriend, had recently made a large drug pickup and we had surplus amounts of methamphetamine on our hands. Sure. Always a great place to find yourself. So as soon as we got settled into the hotel, we started snorting lines and smoking. For a while, everything was like a normal meth trip. We all became hyper-creative and started drawing. Hell yeah. Colin was drawing weird geometric people and I was drawing Egyptians. It would be cooler if this was drawn on little kid fucking table mats.

[01:37:32] It's revealed they're out like an Applebee's, but they're in a hotel. I would love to see what St. Jimmy's Egyptians look like. I'm sure they're doing the Egyptian dance. Colin and Allison left the room to pick up some sodas while I decided to lay down on the bed. From where I was laying, the ceiling looked like it was made of water. It was warping and flowing and changing colors constantly. It was weird, but very pretty. When Colin and Allison came back into the room, I pointed out this phenomenon to Allison.

[01:37:59] Apparently Colin and Allison could see the water ceiling as well, so we all laid down on the bed to watch the show. Matt wanted nothing to do with this because he knows the warning signs of a St. Jimmy meth freakout. And this is one of the signs. I love that you've been dating someone long enough to know when a meth freakout is coming, but not intelligently enough to know that I should probably stop dating the person with telltale signs of a meth freakout. Yeah. However, St. Jimmy himself was totally oblivious to this fact.

[01:38:27] After about 10 minutes, Allison sat up and noticed that a large vortex was forming in the corner of the hotel room. As one does. From this vortex, which looked like a smoky gray cube imploding on itself, emerged hundreds of shadowy figures. Hundreds? It must have been small. They were roughly human in shape and seemed to be composed entirely of shadows. They had no facial features or clothing of any type or any distinguishing marks. Being avid researchers of the paranormal. So that's a fun combo. Yeah.

[01:38:56] Meth addicts who were avid researchers of the paranormal. I'm going to be up all night on this Ouija board. We instantly recognized these creatures to be shadow people. Panic quickly set in as the shadow people began to circle the room. Now, interestingly, one of the reasons they chose this story is a lot of the meth psychosis stories are just a single person. This seems to be a shared hallucination. Yeah, even the ceiling was all shared. Except unless you're Matt, who's like, this is bullshit. This is a problem. He knew the shadow people were coming.

[01:39:27] Only a matter of time. At some point, Matt finally put down his pen and joined the chaos that was rapidly forming in the room. Oh, Matt, I gave you all this credit a second ago. Colin, Allison, and I were huddled in one of the beds together, hyperventilating and in a general state of panic. Shadow people may not sound too frightening to those who know nothing about them, but as people who understand these creatures, we knew enough to be terrified. Shadow people are not malevolent beings.

[01:39:52] They are horrible, extra dimensional beings that I think he meant are. He wrote are not, but I think he meant shadow people are malevolent beings. They are horrible, extra dimensional beings that prey on human energy. Not a good situation to be in when we're spun and paranoid enough as it is. Yeah, and there's hundreds of them. Hundreds of them. Being like, give me that energy, give me that energy, give me that energy. Also, nobody's got more energy than meth users. I know. No wonder they're piling through the clown car. Yeah, you guys got to get in here, man. The clown vortex. You wouldn't believe the energy we just found in this room.

[01:40:23] Filling a hotel room with shadow people. We began talking about what we thought the shadow people were and came to the conclusion that they were beings from another dimension that had entered our dimension through the vortex, which, based on what's been described, seems a bit obvious. Yeah. Here's the really interesting detail. Methamphetamine had allowed our bodies to vibrate at a higher resonance than usual, and this attracted the shadow people. That's what we were saying. So basically what we were saying is true. Colin decided that smoking more meth would make the shadow people go away.

[01:40:54] You'll make them smoke all the cigarettes at once. He'll never want to smoke again. So Allison and I sat on the edge of the bed while Colin held the pipe and lit it for us. In retrospect, I realized this was a horrible idea. Colin. Colin's classic Colin, dude. All we did was make the experience more intense. Finally, Matt jumped in and fed Allison and I some Xanax to calm us down. Unfortunately, nothing happened. The shadow people continue to assault our senses and terrify us.

[01:41:22] Matt and Allison decided that... So they keep bouncing back and forth from good idea to horrible idea to good idea. Matt and Allison decided they would attempt to take photos of the shadow people with their cell phones. If you're experiencing this level of paranormal activity, fantastic idea. We can use the proof. Yeah. So they took off on an expedition to the bathroom, which for some reason seemed to be the best place to take photos to all of us. But that's the one place they never said they were.

[01:41:48] I mean, if you're filling a hotel room with hundreds of shadow people, they gotta go somewhere. We got some, a couple of guys being like, what's going on out there? It sucks. We're in the bathroom. Yeah. I never get to... Oh, hey, what's up, guys? They're in here now with us. Colin and I... We thought this was a bad seat. This is the shadow people talking. Yes. They thought this was a bad seat, and now the show's come to them. This is very exciting. It's a great place. Yeah. Colin and I sat on the end of my bed and waited for their return. I noticed that the closer to Colin I got, the more intense the visualizations got. Allison later stated that she noticed the same thing when near Matt.

[01:42:19] We later decided that Colin and Matt were conduits for Allison and my psychic energy, and that they increased our ability to perceive the shadow people. Okay. Soon, a mass about the size of a human torso began forming underneath the table. Nope. It was a large translucent blob with no discernible form. Nope. Hate that. Colin and I started screaming for Matt and Allison... Correct. Correct move. ...to come back, and they ran into the room.

[01:42:46] The blob started speaking to me telepathically, telling me that it was going to spiritually possess me and use my body to murder my friends. Was there an... Womp womp. Yeah. Was there an or else at least? No. Or else I'll... There's not like a... Wow, that sucks. This is just... It's happening. As it was speaking... The ultimatum being made. As it was speaking, it began climbing up my body. It inserted three tentacles into my navel and began to enter my body. Bad.

[01:43:14] Where the tentacles touched me, I felt the sensation similar to ice-cold needles being pushed through my skin. Can anyone else see it? I wanted to get up and run away, but the creature had me completely paralyzed. To answer your question, I think yes, because Allison started screaming at me to run and for Matt and Colin to do something, but they just stood there dumbfounded. Well, yeah. You got a fucking blob with tentacles. It's chosen you. It's leaving us alone. To use your body to murder your friends. They don't... They may not have heard that because it was telepathy. That's true.

[01:43:44] So they only see the blob that they see is not attacking them. This is a fucking this guy's problem. But if they could see the blob, I would be screaming to them, this blob wants to use my body to murder you. It's true, but I don't know where his mind was at. Allison took matters into her own hands and took a flying leap at the creature and tackled it, ripping it out of my body. Oh my God. Allison. Matt grabbed me under my arms and Colin grabbed my legs and carried me to the other bed. Imagine just trying to sleep at the hotel room next to this. Just being like all fucking night, they've been...

[01:44:13] I've heard like huge smashes and crashes. The vortex opened up and now there's a body snatcher that's going to murder everybody else. I have a wake up call for 6 a.m. I'm here for a conference. Half the plot of the film Fallen is taking place next door. I just want to go to sleep. I just want to go to bed. Matt grabbed me under my arms and Colin grabbed my legs and carried me to the other bed. During this, my body was completely frozen. They dumped me on the bed and tried to get me to respond, but for a few minutes I was unable to move or speak.

[01:44:41] I have very vague memories of what happened next. All I recall is Allison telling me the creature was gone. After I came back from my state of paralysis, Matt ordered me into the shower. I refused and started crying, telling him that shadow people were in the shower and I didn't want to be in the same place as them, which if everyone was just in the bathroom trying to take photos with the shadow people, which I imagine looked like that Oscars selfie of everybody, like Ellen DeGeneres. Oh my God, that weird.

[01:45:09] Them with the shadow people is the picture that resulted. It makes sense that you wouldn't want to go in the bathroom to be quite honest. Or get naked. Yeah. But Matt grabbed me by the arm and basically dragged me into the bathroom. He undressed me and shoved me into the shower and then climbed in after me. Well, they are dating. They are dating. Maybe not for long. After this, I became completely hysterical seeing shadow people all around me. I huddled up in a ball, making myself as small as humanly possible. At this point, I doubt I was coherent.

[01:45:39] I was babbling while sobbing and shaking and trying to hide in the shower. Matt dragged me to my feet and asked me if I thought the rest of my life was going to be like this. So Matt is either being really cruel or trying to make a very important decision. Yeah, that's what I'm literally thinking. In his own life. Like, listen, I got to put in the two weeks notice on this relationship if this is my life with you. Yeah, here we go. I nodded. He then told me that if I was like this for the rest of my life, he couldn't be with me anymore. There it is. Which is upsetting, but reasonable.

[01:46:08] Matt, set boundaries. Reasonable. It's important. This is an important move for you. Then I really lost it. I started crying harder and screaming at him. I don't remember what I said. All I remember is Matt spitting in my face and shaking me as hard as he could and yelling me to calm down. I don't know if you needed to spit in someone's face, Matt. That's a step over the line there. Yeah. Eventually, he got me calm enough to actually take a shower. The shadow people- Yeah, shower the spit off you. Well, and the shadow people he notes were mostly gone by this time. Mostly? Just one or two watching? One in the shower with him. Being like, I'm not going anywhere. Looking at him.

[01:46:38] This is why I came through the vortex. I was promised there'd be some shower stuff. He dried me off and dressed me, he being Matt, not the shadow person. The shower people was like, hey man, I think they're watchers. I don't think they're really getting involved. He dried me off and dressed me because I was incapable of doing it myself and walked me out to the bedroom. From the looks of things, Colin and Allison had just had a conversation similar to ours. Colin looked totally drained, as did Matt, and Allison was laying in the bed sobbing and exhausted.

[01:47:04] Matt and I climbed into our bed, and after a while of laying in bed in a state of total paranoia, we all finally drifted off to sleep for a few hours. The shadow people stayed with me for a few months. I saw them constantly, even when I wasn't high. I personally believe that what we saw that night was real. Matt disagrees and believes that everything we saw was drug-induced. Real cold water thrower there.

[01:47:29] I am no longer on speaking terms with Colin and Allison and thus cannot put forth their opinions. I believe that Allison and I have some sort of psychic powers and that methamphetamine put us in a highly receptive state. Wow, flash evolution. I was going to say, to put it as our friend might have put it, they flash evolved to a higher state and saw the shadow people. Sometimes when you flash evolve, you've got to leave your old friends behind. They won't understand. To further complicate this matter is the subject of the photos.

[01:47:56] We all saw shadow people in those photos when we reviewed them at a later time. Today, however, Matt claims there is nothing in those photos and they have all mysteriously disappeared. There's no way I would let one person have that fucking photo. The photos were all on Matt's phone. I'd be like, fucking tooth it to me, bro. Airdrop that to me right now. St. Jimmy finishes by saying, I think he is in denial and does not want to face what the four of us went through and so disposed of the photos.

[01:48:24] But it sounds like he's still in talking terms with Matt because he cut off ties with Allison. I'd love to know how this relationship went after that. I think this, I mean, I'm sure all of this was in their vows. Yeah. They're married. They have, they've adopted children. I mean, I wish the best for these two, but I thought this was a, one of the more interesting best psychosis stories just because it's so crazy that they all saw things together. Yeah. If the communal aspect is very fun to me, the paranormal and or alien aspect is fun.

[01:48:54] One, it kind of ties into some of the hat man Benadryl stuff that these drugs can open portals to other dimensions or other states of being and that you can see these shadow people. Yeah. But for sure, the most interesting fact is that we all saw it together and the idea that this person claims that there was photographic evidence is even crazier. And that Matt is now a fucking government stooge. Piece of shit, Matt. And deleted them. Yeah. To cover it up. Didn't want to show it to us in a skiff. Yeah.

[01:49:24] So that's meth, man. Uh, don't do it. It's bad. Don't do it. It opens portals to hell. It opens portals to hell. It fries your brain. It might turn you into a math genius, but it probably won't. You might lose your virginity in a disgusting stall. Yeah. According to the, uh, Midwest advertisements. Meth is a hell on earth that you don't want to fuck around with. So Ed, that does bring us though, to our fear tier for the week. Where would you place meth on your fear tier?

[01:49:52] I mean, it sounds like in low doses, it's a vibe. You'll evolve. It evolves. You'll evolve and you'll get all the best stares from people. So I guess in that sense. And their daughters. And their daughters, guys. And their daughters. So I guess in that sense, it's a zero. But no, I don't know. It's a tough one. It's one of those ones where it's like, I don't see myself doing, uh, any meth more than what we're prescribed.

[01:50:21] I don't see myself doing crystal meth. I'm definitely not going to smoke meth out of a glass bowl. All this to say, I put meth so high on the fear tier that I will never take it, which then actually puts it very low on the fear tier. That's exactly. You know, meth. That's a good point. Meth is like a 10, but because it's a 10, I will never touch it. So it's a one. And we might run into this a lot in the drug episodes, which is like, yeah, if we do heroin, if we do whatever, it's like, yeah, it's, it's, it's. It'll fucking kill you.

[01:50:48] If you are smart enough or able to not take one of these, it's just a no brainer to not take them. Yeah. And so, yeah, I guess it's a, it's a 10 zero split. Yeah. Interesting. We might have to create a new fear tier category. We got to update the fear tier anyway. The, the, we got to put some new drawings up. The person who used to do the drawings, I think, stopped listening to the show. So we'll have to find some new drawings. We scared them too bad, I guess. Scared them too bad, man. Or they were on meth. We were able to have all that extra time to draw. True.

[01:51:17] Now they're not on meth and they're unproductive and not getting any stares. So yeah, it's a, it's a 10 zero split for me, which is high enough to not do it. So it becomes a zero. Well, as always, if you enjoyed this episode and you want to support the show further, the best way to do that is at patreon.com backslash scared all the time. Leave us a review five star reviews. We often read at the beginning of the show, rate us, review us on iTunes, Spotify. It really helps. It really helps get the show out there.

[01:51:47] And come hang out at the live shows. Come listen to the bonus apps. Yeah, we've got a lot going on. 2025 is the year of the scaredy cat. We're pushing forward through fires, through children, through everything else to get you guys the best scared content. Somehow doing it not on meth. Somehow doing it not on meth. Meth is crazy, guys. So it's like a Herculean task. But yeah, we love you guys. Thank you so much for listening. It's really been a...

[01:52:12] You know, this show does for our lives the opposite of what meth does to most people's lives. I'm going off of two schools of thought on meth right now. So I don't know which one you're talking about. It makes our lives much better. Oh, good. Okay. Anyway, this has been scared all the time. I'm Chris Killari. And I'm not on meth. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Scare All the Time is co-produced by Chris Killari and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Killari. Edited by Ed Ficola.

[01:52:40] Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew. And Mr. Disclaimer is... And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch. So go sign up for our Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com. Don't worry. All scaredy cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission.

[01:53:09] Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Night. We are in this together. Together. Together.